News, Announcements & Writings

Name one thing Avi Rose, Marcie Rubel, Julia Epstein, Dolores Taller and Michael Saxe-Taller have in common? They recently joined the Legacy Society at Kehilla. The Legacy Society is open and growing, and we hope you too will consider joining. What’s the Legacy Society? It’s a wonderful way to help ensure that Kehilla will be here for generations to come by building an endowment.

About seven years ago, long time congregant Laura Boxer and former executive director Sandy Bredt agreed to participate in the Jewish Community Foundation of the East Bay’s program called Create a Jewish Legacy. The program helped train us to develop a Legacy program.

The Legacy Program helped Kehilla begin to build an endowment by assisting us in setting up a process for receiving after-life gifts. What is an after-life gift? It’s often a bequest or a beneficiary from a retirement account, that becomes a gift to Kehilla after the donor passes away. I joined the program as the fundraising chair and over the past few years, I’ve been working with a number of other Kehilla folks who have volunteered to continue this work.

I’m delighted to let you know we now have 47 members of the Legacy Society — people who have committed to an afterlife gift to Kehilla. The total value of these commitments is over $1.6 million dollars. These are contributions that will come in over time, helping to grow Kehilla’s endowment when we are no longer here.

Our program partner, the Jewish Community Foundation of the East Bay runs the Life and Legacy Program, and offers us excellent training. The Life and Legacy Program includes 13 local Jewish Institutions, mostly East Bay Synagogues. Last year, each of the 13 participating organizations reached their goal of 18 new legacy commitments! That meant that each organization received a gift of $10,000 from the program sponsor, The Harold Grinspoon Foundation. Indeed, we were happy to receive this gift and used it wisely.

Now we’re in the middle of Year Two and we’re moving toward our goal of 18 new commitments in this year. We’d love to have you join us in helping to secure Kehilla’s future for generations to come. Feel free to ask any of us about the program.

You don’t have to be wealthy to leave a legacy to Kehilla – in fact, this is a way to give Kehilla money when you can’t use it anymore. There are lots of ways to do this; some are as simple as naming Kehilla as a beneficiary of your IRA, 401(k) or other retirement savings fund. That takes only a few minutes, and often can be done online. Another way is to designate Kehilla as one of the beneficiaries of your life insurance policy. Even your bank account has a place for you to designate who should get your savings when you die.

If you have a trust or will, you can add Kehilla as a beneficiary of your estate through those documents. You can specify an amount, or you can specify a percentage of your estate. You can even specify that Kehilla gets money only after your children do.